Good Bone Meat

Momma said there were bones in the woods. Not the soft kind you find in meat. The brittle kind, the old ones.

Papa hunted with a rusty rifle he kept in the shed. The old wood kind that don’t work too well. He always came back with mud on his shoes, but only sometimes with blood on his hands. Those were the days we ate good. Soft bone meat kinda good.

Little George dared me to go into the woods. Said to go past the river that took away the dog in the rain season. Papa said we couldn’t cross it. Momma said to not even go near it. Got scared real bad when she showed me what was over there. Things that made those bones go old. They scream when just look at you. But only at night.

So little George said to cross the river with the sun out. Said that it would scare the screaming things away. So when papa went out hunting, and momma was sleeping with the baby, we snuck to the river.

A stick the size of my arm looked the perfect weapon. Just in case. A fat crawler tried to run when I picked it up, but I put it in my pocket for later. Momma said not to waste.

When I was small, papa came back all sweaty and tired. He had the axe over his shoulder that got us wood in the winter. His hands were bleeding, though. Momma wrapped him up and made us supper. That was a good bone meat night.

A pile of old stinking wood sat broken by the river. Long flat pieces like the house was made of. But these ones were even older and had metal bits twisted in them so they were no good for burning. The hidden path that papa used to cross the river was skinny, and you had to jump high in the middle, but I was good at jumping. Little George looked even littler from this side of the river. I couldn’t even see his crooked teeth.

These woods looked just the same as our side. Tall, scratchy trees that were no good for climbing. One day I might be tall enough to reach the low branches, but not yet. I looked for the screaming things, but it was quiet here. Next I turned ‘round, the river wasn’t there, but I could still hear it, noisy and rushing. Always in a hurry.

Momma said there were bones in the woods, white and old and brittle. There were more bones than sticks here. Big ones, little ones, all stacked in piles. Some scuttling thing ran over the bones, but my stick was too slow. I went off after it, it would make a good meat night. There weren’t many trees here, in the place the scuttling thing went. Big pointy rocks with a mouth like hunger. It smelled like rotting, but so did supper sometimes.

I forgot all about the screaming things and that I was on the wrong side of the river. The mouth had swallowed me up, and it was dark. A scream echoed somewhere in the black, so I ran for the sun. There was a big crunch and a squeal that sounded like the scuttling thing. Better it than me.

Safe in the light, I looked back to the mouth. It breathed at me and spat out a screaming thing. Except it wasn’t screaming. It looked a little like momma did when she had her long sleeps. She did that sometimes after days she didn’t eat. The screaming thing had hair like the trees out back. It’s eyes were all white, and it sniffed the air like the old dog.

An old bone crunched under my boots and the screaming thing came toward me, teeth all out, yellow and rotting. I hit my stick on the ground, loud and quick, and the big mouth shouted it right back at me.

“None left. Only me,” the screaming thing said.

It scurried back into the dark, but it still didn’t scream.

“Wait,” I said. “Are you a screaming thing?”

It sniffed the air again, turning this way and that.

“Are you with the man?”

“I’m not papa,” I said.

“There’s a man with a loud bang who takes us away. All gone, only me,” the screaming thing said.

Its eyes, all white, went big, and then a bang louder than my stick made it fall down.

“I told you not to cross the river,” papa said, his voice loud and mad.

He went into the dark and picked up the screaming thing. Something went clink and a bright shiny fell off the screaming thing. Not even the old forks were that bright. I hurried into the stinking dark and took the shiny thing. A shiny heart on a shiny string. There was a little paper inside, but I left that behind.

I followed quiet, back across the river. It was a good bone meat kinda night.